Conceptualizing the Everyday Life of Security Through Narrative and Affect
Haya Al-Noaimi
This piece seeks to pluralize the discourse on security by making a case for understanding security through a narrative approach, paying close attention to how space, practice, and affect implicate each other in the everyday life of security. It uses an artistic literary piece by Qatari American artist and filmmaker, Sophia Al Maria, to interrogate a story of survival amidst state security practices and securitization. In doing so, it challenges dominant modes of understanding security—and its needs—by paying attention to gender, race, class, and lived experience as intersectional markers of identity intimately involved in shaping that which is to be secured.
Put simply, a narrative is a “way of making sense of the world around us”. Through narratives, individuals engage with the world, produce meaning and knowledge, articulate intentions, and politics to justify action. In Sophia Al Maria’s artistic and memoirist literary piece titled The Way of the Ostrich or How not to Resist Modernity (2007), Al Maria returns to the moment when she stood in a darkened room in Qatar’s National Museum, watching footage of her tribe play on a screen on repeat. No one visits the room. She reflects on her origins as she is confronted with that of her nomadic tribe: an American mother, and a long-lost father from the deserts of the Empty Quarter. She speaks about the history of an indigenous community living in and off the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, called on at different points in history to pledge their allegiance to various state armies. Tribal people born in borderlands, with overlapping identities, were historically militarized by the (nation) state as their service was weaponized by one state against another to instigate (failed) coups. The result of this was to make six thousand members of this one tribe, stateless by stripping away their nationalities.
In the context Al Maria speaks of, both physical space (borderland) and subject (her tribe) are securitized for the “threat” they “pose” to the state. The experience of statelessness that affected many of Al Maria’s tribe permeates everyday spaces like the bedroom, workplaces, classrooms, and hospital waiting rooms. Individuals with revoked citizenship in the Gulf lose access to formal education, healthcare, and employment, and are unable to register the birth of any new children. Here, we begin to see how (in)security is reproduced and experienced in mundane, everyday locations outside of formal politics. In many ways, the revocation of citizenship is a security practice that affects routine in the everyday. But because it happens routinely, such practices appear as irrelevant, unimportant, or even devoid of power.
Intertwined between the paragraphs of Al Maria’s writing are collaged images of barren desert landscapes, each interposed by a projector screen that displays black and white photographs of nomadic Bedouin and Berber tribes. In their own way, these collages depict deserts as mundane—and empty—spaces, in which “routine” state practices of security and securitization actively shape the corporeality of the subject as a result of its lived experiences of (in)security. The viewer of these images is perhaps left with a similar feeling to that of Al Maria’s when she stood in an empty room at the museum watching images of her own tribe playing on a screen. Of a time, and people that were once there, but no longer remain except as still images that play on our screens. But as Babar reminds us, migration in its various forms “is to be scrutinized not as natural or inevitable, but as something outside the norm, destabilizing and potentially dangerous.”
Al-Maria’s work as a Qatari futurist writer and artist is concerned with how modernity and the agendas of the dominant class affect local communities in the region. At the end of the essay, she remarks that the greatest change threatening the existence of her tribe and indigenous communities alike is not migration, lack of mobility, or even statelessness, but is, in fact, irrelevance. Of younger generations not caring, or not knowing how practices, processes, or subjectivities came to be what they are today.
In her book, Borderlands/La Frontera Chicana writer and poet Gloria Anzaldúa introduces the concept of la facultad which she defines as the ability or faculty for instant “sensing,” a quick perception without conscious reasoning. She notes that, at its first stage, la facultad is a survival technique that is developed by those:
“who are pushed out of the tribe for being different [making them more] likely to become more sensitized (when not brutalized into insensitivity). Those who do not feel psychologically or physically safe in the world are more apt to develop this sense. ”
At a later stage, the development of la facultad relates to:
“anything that breaks into one’s everyday mode of perception, that causes a break in one’s defenses and resistance, anything that takes one from one’s habitual grounding, causes the depth to open up, causes a shift in perception. ”
The ability or la facultad that Anzaldúa speaks about is present in Al Maria’s literary perspective.
In her analysis of Anzaldúa’s work, Veruska Cantelli notes how borderland people are:
“caught in a paradox of being born in a space where they are not recognized as legitimate, or where they are categorized as different, and therefore constantly being asked to question their own existence.”
The effects of statelessness that many of Al Maria’s tribe experienced did not only physically and spiritually dislocate them from the borderland, but also worked by fixing their identities to a singular demarcated space that was defined by their stateless condition.
However, Anzaldúa affirms that individuals and communities that experience oppression but refuse to be caught in the mode of submission and victimization can tap into a level of awareness that can help them connect with a collective consciousness that practices of cultural and state oppression have tried to conceal. She calls it the new mestiza consciousness which seeks to:
“shift out of habitual formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes. The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity […]. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else.”
Al Maria’s writing turns this ambivalence into something else. She uses her own hybrid identity and the affective/embodied experience of insecurity that was experienced by her tribe to displace traditional security narratives on the centrality of sovereign states. Her work emphasizes the ways in which citizens are often forgotten in national security narratives, drawing our attention towards what Menge describes as the “violent effects of ‘mastering’ the future” by making us, or only some of us, more secure. This literary move by Al Maria produces a space where a plethora of security narratives exist alongside one another, rife with uncertainty and contradictions, proving that states, like individuals, are always in the process of becoming.
references
Al Maria, Sophia. 2007. “The Way of the Ostrich, Or How to Not Resist Modernity.” Bidoun. Accessed May 18, 2023. Read More.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. (1999). Borderlands: La frontera: The New Mestiza (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Read More.
Cantelli, Veruska. 2012. “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Poetics of Borders.” Warscapes. Accessed May 18, 2023. Read More.
Moulin, Carolina. 2016. “Narrative.” In Critical Imaginations in International Relations, edited by Aoileann Ní Mhurchú, and Reiko Shindo. New York: Routledge. Read More.
Wibben, Annick T. R. 2010. Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach (1st ed.). London: Routledge. Read More.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Haya Al-Noaimi is an assistant professor in residence in the Liberal Arts Program at Northwestern University in Qatar. Al-Noaimi's work looks at meanings of 'protection,' practices of security, and lived experiences of insecurity in the Gulf region during the colonial (1800s-1960s) and postcolonial (1970s-present) periods.
citation
To cite: Al-Noaimi, H. "Conceptualizing the Everyday Life of Security Through Narrative and Affect." In Developing Critical Security Studies from Doha, edited by Hermez, S., Doha: #IAS_NUQ Press/Beirut: Arab Council for the Social Sciences, 2024.